Decision reversibility is much overlooked in resilience engineering.
In a perfect world we'd have a kind of quantum uncertainty, where we
forked reality into two streams, and maintained two options until one
or the other proved a safe passage. Quoting from Digital Vegan;
"Consider how the UK government let our drinking water reservoirs be
sold off for property development, believing that advanced JIT (just
in time) management technology, smart metering and so forth, would
dispense with them. Then climate change came. Reservoirs are like
power supply capacitors; they absorb as well as smooth out
supply. Now in the UK we have housing estates built on flood plains.
Rivers burst their banks with every downpour. Knocking down
thousands of peoples' houses to regain reservoir capacity is much
/harder/ than it was to sell the reservoirs to developers."
The transition from a reservoir to a housing estate looks like a net
gain in "order" (entropy reduction) because it seems to create value,
but considering the system as a whole (cost of losing infrastructure)
it increases disorder.
Similarly our gushing project toward an "online cashless society" is
playing with dangerous forces. It's a net destruction of wealth and
order. It won't be cheap or quick to re-open shops, print and
distribute cash, install ATMs and money handling facilities once the
terrifying brittleness of a wholly digital economy becomes
clear. Those imagining "Nothing can possibly go wrong with the all
Bitcoin + Amazon society", haven't thought through the reality of what
happens when tens of millions of people can't get food even though it's
in a warehouse less than 100 miles from their house.
I'd imagine 1970s Ireland was a much different place, with tons of paper money all over the place. In 2022 Ireland I haven't touched physical money in months. If Visa/MasterCard or my bank stopped working I'd be faaaahkt.
> I'd imagine 1970s Ireland was a much different place, with tons of
paper money all over the place.
Exactly. Perhaps that was the GP commeners point. Banks, phones and
internet connectivity are not necessary for survival of economic life
given a sufficient circulation of stable physical currency.
Gold and barter don't count because of agreement/coordination
problems.
Cash money is not like any other sort of imaginary money. It exists.
Physically. In the world. It has physical stability.
It therefore acts a buffer, more like a flywheel maintaining momentum
and providing strong resilience to back up more ethereal transactional
instruments.
Modern cash is also a highly advanced technology, using state of the
art mathematics and materials science.
Contactless, and debit cards are fine things, for those who want them,
but without actual cash as a foundation they're a deadly trap.
I am uttery aghast that supposedly "clever" economists and
technologists seem not to grasp this simplest of concepts.
Because, if 'they' have a better system in place, that allows for greater control, they would want to move people to that instead. Just like how people are migrated from legacy systems to new ones.
The system we are meant to migrate to is ai-managed technocracy, with global governance (country governments will be adminstrative - they are that now tbh), central Bank digital currency (programmable, temporary credits - no cash) to allow tracking of everything, 'smart/spy' everything (phones, electricity, water) to allow for micro control of each individuals resource use.
'Saving the planet from climate change' is narrative that is in use to get turkeys voting for Christmas.
Unrelated, but inspired. A lot of people can't get food and other goods and services even though it's close to them or possible to provide them right now. And it works as intended and a few think that something went wrong.
It's rather the opposite: if there were no such people, it would be the scariest thing to people. Because how can communism go? Wrong answers only.
In a perfect world we'd have a kind of quantum uncertainty, where we forked reality into two streams, and maintained two options until one or the other proved a safe passage. Quoting from Digital Vegan;
The transition from a reservoir to a housing estate looks like a net gain in "order" (entropy reduction) because it seems to create value, but considering the system as a whole (cost of losing infrastructure) it increases disorder.Similarly our gushing project toward an "online cashless society" is playing with dangerous forces. It's a net destruction of wealth and order. It won't be cheap or quick to re-open shops, print and distribute cash, install ATMs and money handling facilities once the terrifying brittleness of a wholly digital economy becomes clear. Those imagining "Nothing can possibly go wrong with the all Bitcoin + Amazon society", haven't thought through the reality of what happens when tens of millions of people can't get food even though it's in a warehouse less than 100 miles from their house.